BMW contributor and longtime Stylus writer Nick Southall wrote a piece "Why We Killed It" on his blog about the death of Stylus. Last year when sorting through the loads of writing I get for the book I noticed a huge trend for these meta-critic pieces, and rightfully so. As Southall so eloquently writes, there is an absolutely huge and unstoppable change going on in music writing as a career, as a site of knowledge, as a critical dialogue with art, as a discussion with/communication to readers. As I seem to be a mostly web-based writer now myself (is it generational? I'm under 30 and thus this is MY field?), I have talked with a number of people very specifically about what Southall outlines as a growing problem with thoughtfulness and 2.0 architecture - the "indie" diy model does not work when the backend is so heavy. Is 2.0 participatory culture only available in with corporate structure and large capital? Southall says:

Some of the guys wanted to start a new site, but… the work involved five years ago was monstrous. The work involved now would be absolutely fucking unconscionable. The rules have changed. See Playlouder, see all that login shite, that community network download application Facebook bullshit. If you wanted to start a new site today and make it into a viable success, a business model, you need Web 2.0, simple as that. Because people don’t fucking care about… thought, and criticism. Not most people. Consumption is not thought, as Alfred so wisely said.

I am not as doomsday about the consumption/thought divide, although I would say that they ways of knowing about music are changing, and that we must now really think about the role of the "critic" as a curator also.